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kitchen witchery

I now understand everyone’s obsession with the Instant Pot. It’s definitely not your grandmother’s pressure cooker.

I am not Inspector Gadget in the kitchen, more of a traditionalist. Some things I have begrudgingly come to own because they make life easier- like my Breville blender. Or my crockpot.

But as much as I love fooling with my crockpot if you don’t have time for low and slow, well it boils stuff to death.

Anyway, people I know kept buying the Instant Pot so I started watching it and the prices have stabilized recently, so I splurged.

It sat in the box and stared at me for a week. And then I got sick, so I was not cooking much of anything.

I was craving plain chicken and chicken soup as I started to feel better but knew I wasn’t up to much in the kitchen- so out of the box came the Instant Pot.

Yes, I literally cooked a nice plain chicken simply prepared with just salt and pepper and Herbes de Provence in about half an hour!

I then turned around and took the chicken off the carcass and made bone broth in 35 minutes using the soup setting – real gelatinous bone broth.

I also made a pot of chili for the rest of my house yesterday using canned beans and ground beef in 10 minutes on the Instant Pot chili setting after browning the ground beef and onions using their sauté setting. Next time I would reduce the liquid as the chili came out thinner and darker like Texas chili. (I like a thicker chili)

It took a while to read the manual and then I will admit I watched a few YouTube videos on using the pot and cooking with it, but when you are sitting in bed getting better, there is the time to do that.

For years I had avoided pressure cookers. The old stovetop ones would create one hot mess when they exploded. I remember a food on the ceiling incident at my great aunts’ when I was a kid- the pot lid flew off. But this is so different with so many safety bells and whistles- it practically speaks to you.